For years the memory and the desire for revenge smoldered, until one night Lester and another deputy got the call to respond to a domestic disturbance in Oakes Hollow. It was the day of the big announcement about the new power plant in Red Bone. The day the helicopters came. It wasn’t clear from the call who was beating whom, but Wayne Lester knew who it would be as he opened the trunk of his patrol car to get his heavy lead-filled riot stick.
Drunk and out of control, Buck could be counted on to resist arrest, especially with a little provocation from Lester. The darkness provided sufficient cover for Lester to administer some solid shots to Buck’s rib cage and a few to his calves and kneecaps, but it wasn’t until they got Buck to the jail’s underground garage that Lester went to work with a vengeance. Buck ended up with several broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a broken nose and jaw, and a fractured tibia. He was in the hospital two weeks longer than Natty was.
When Natty turned on the lamp in the darkening parlor, her attention was drawn to several framed photographs that decorated the sparsely furnished room. There was a pastel-tinted wedding picture of Birdie and Everett, looking young and scared. The largest picture on the wall was a grainy black-and-white photograph of a group of coal miners. Behind the men, a sign identified the mine as U.S. STEEL NUMBER 9. In the foreground of the picture, November 1954, Everett, 2nd row, #4 was written in white marker.
Natty knew all about Everett Merkely, even though he had died in 1985, five years after retiring from thirty-three years in the mines. Everett was Birdie’s singular interest in life while he was alive and her number-one topic of conversation afterward. Her husband had come out of the mines with emphysema and black lung. His last years with Birdie were not pleasant, as he slowly suffocated in his own fluids.
Natty thought about the photo that Birdie had chosen to hold as she died and tried to recall the few pictures she had of Buck and her together. None revealed anything like the love and pure joy experienced by the couple in Pensacola. She went back into Birdie’s bedroom and sat in a tall straight-backed wooden chair, awaiting Wayne Lester. Natty put her head back, folded her arms in front of her chest, and gave in to the exhaustion of a long day.
A booming voice startled her out of half sleep. “Well, if it ain’t Natty De-nit-Witt, sleeping on the job!”
She looked up to see the hulking figure of Deputy Sheriff Wayne Lester filling the doorway of the bedroom. Six-four and closing in on three hundred pounds, Lester was an intimidating figure. Hooked onto his shirt pocket was a pair of aviator sunglasses. A pencil-thin black mustache adorned his pockmarked face. He wiggled a toothpick between his crooked teeth as he alternately eyed Natty and the figure on the bed.
Natty resisted the urge to come back with a Lester the Molester crack and decided to be civil so she could get out of the house and back home. “Hey, Wayne, how you been?”
“I’m fine, Nat, just fine.” He was clearly encouraged by Natty’s tone. “I see you running down the road real early sometimes, when I’m going through Red Bone headed up to Eve’s for breakfast. You lookin’ good these days, Nat, real good. Lookin’ like a real woman now.”
Maybe it was always a mistake to be civil to a slug like Lester. Natty smiled. “Thanks for noticing, Wayne.”
Lester turned and walked toward the bed. “So what have we got here, then? Bye Bye Birdie, like the movie, right?” He chuckled as he leaned over for a closer look. “What do you think happened here, Nat?”
What happened here? God, what do you think happened here, Lester? Natty just wanted to go home. She didn’t want to talk about Birdie, but she knew she’d be able to leave quicker if she helped him do his job.
“What happened here, Lester,” Natty snapped a little too brusquely before catching herself, “is that Birdie got tired of always feeling the pain from her arthritis, tired of limping and hurting on her bad hip and using a walker.” Natty’s voice became softer as she looked at her friend on the bed. “And she got tired of being alone, having nobody to do things for, nobody to share things with, no one to love. And no one to love her.” Natty paused for a moment. “So she went out and got her hair done, came home and gave her house a good cleaning, made herself up pretty as she could, put on her best dress, turned on her favorite music, lay down on the bed with her nice soft quilt, and had a glass of wine and a bottle of Darvocet pills.”
Lester bent over to look at the label on the pill bottle. “She don’t smell too bad, though. Not like that big nigger we found last summer, dead in his shed a couple weeks. Stunk so bad they had to burn that shed—”
“Lester, don’t use that kind of talk around me. I mean it. Now, can I go? I need to get home.”
“Well, not so fast there, Nat. Why don’t you sit on the sofa for a bit, while I do my investigation? Then I’ll come out and you can give me your statement.” Lester put his fleshy palm to Natty’s back and gently pushed her toward the doorway, taking his hand away with a subtle sideways rub.
After a few minutes, Lester came out of the bedroom and wandered into the kitchen. Natty saw him take off his equipment belt and lay it over the back of a chair. “Looks like the old bird left some groceries here on the table before she kicked off,” Lester called out to Natty.
“I bought that stuff, Lester, for Birdie, and she owes me fifteen dollars. You think if we found her purse, I could see if she had some money and—”
Coming back into the parlor, Lester cut her off. “No can do, Nat. Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “Cannot remove any property, especially monetary funds, from the scene.”
“Aw, cut the shit, Lester, I need the money for gas. I spent my last dollar on them groceries, and I ain’t got even a quarter on me.”
“That’s okay, Nat, maybe I’ll give you some money for gas later on.” Lester took off his beaked cap and dropped it on one of the rocking chairs. He put a spiral notepad and his pocket tape recorder on the table as he sat down on the couch right next to Natty.
She started to stand up, but Lester shot his right arm around her and pulled her back down. “Now, hold on there, Nat. Don’t be getting jumpy. I’m just going to take your statement.” He edged a little closer and turned so that his left leg now blocked her escape.
Natty realized the predicament she was in, alone in an isolated cabin with a man like Wayne Lester. “Lester, you can get my statement at the kitchen table. Why’re you doing this?” she pleaded, once again trying to get off the couch.
The policeman tightened his grip with his right arm and slid his left hand up Natty’s thigh. Her white poplin pants were still damp from the rain. “You ought to take off these wet clothes, Nat, and let ’em dry. We got more than an hour before the M.E. gets up here.” He pulled Natty closer. Her left hand tried to push his hand away, with no effect.
Lester leaned in toward Natty’s face and did his best to affect a soft, intimate tone. “And I know you could use a little lovin’, Nat, stuck with that shit-heel wife-beating husband of yours.”
“Lester, stop this right now!” Natty yelled.
He nuzzled her neck as Natty turned away. “How is old Bucko these days? I hear he’s back to visitin’ that big gal up in Northfork again. Just can’t stay away from her, I guess. You hear that, Nat?”
Natty stopped struggling. Lester had given her the means to escape. “Lester, you take this any further than it’s already gone, then I’m going to have to go home and tell my husband everything that’s happened here. And what do you think Buck Oakes will do after I tell him Wayne Lester tried to rape his wife?” She could feel a slight relaxing of his grip on her shoulder.
“Aw, fuck you, Natty.” Lester got off the couch. “I ain’t afraid of Buck.” But Lester didn’t sound convincing as he gathered up his notebook and tape recorder. “Plus, he’s still on probation. Get in big trouble, assaultin’ a law enforcement officer,” he added. “But I guess I made a mistake here. Just takin’ a shot, Nat, you know, hoping that … Well, you can take off now.”
“Okay, Lester, that�
��s good. You made a little misjudgment is all,” Natty offered, as she straightened out her clothes.
The deputy looked relieved. “Thanks, Nat. Got a little carried away for a minute. You’re lookin’ real good these days, Nat, so I was just hoping, you know.”
Natty smiled, trying to ease the large man’s embarrassment. “Thanks, Lester. But I am a married woman.” She was relieved the episode was over. Buck didn’t need any trouble with Wayne Lester. And she didn’t need any trouble with him, either, as he served on the county’s youth sports coaches board, which supervised the soccer coaches.
Natty walked past Lester into the bedroom and said goodbye to her friend Birdie. She squeezed Birdie’s hand, then picked up the Pensacola picture and stuffed it into her pocket. She wanted a remembrance of Birdie, and her friend’s last image of life on earth seemed as fitting as anything else.
In the hallway, she stopped to pick up her equipment bag. “Now I got to go, Lester. Take care of Birdie for me.” She left the grocery bag where it was on the counter and went out the front door. He followed her onto the porch.
“So, we’re okay, Nat, right? You ain’t going to say nothin’ about … You ain’t saying nothing to Buck?”
Natty turned her head to reply as she walked to her car. “We’re okay, Lester. Take care of Birdie. I’ll see you.” She put her case in the backseat. But there was something else hanging over her now, something she couldn’t leave without knowing. She stood with her hands on the top of the open door and looked back at Lester. “Wayne, what you said in there, about that woman in Northfork. You just bringing up old news, or you knowin’ something?”
The deputy gazed off into the distance, a new toothpick bobbing between his teeth. “Well, Nat, I can’t personally vouch for anything, but, you know, cops hear lots of stuff; some true, some ain’t.” He looked back at Natty. “So, maybe there’s nothin’ to it at all.”
Natty gave Lester a brief nod of understanding. She turned the Honda around in the tall weeds in front of the house and drove past the white police cruiser, feeling as alone as she had in a long time.
She ran out of gas a mile from Oakes Hollow. Natty sighed, then had to laugh at what was such a fitting end to the day. She pulled off her white nursing shoes and knee-high nylons, tossed them into the backseat, stuffed her purse under the front seat, and sprinted home barefoot, finally allowing the tears to flow freely for her friend Birdie Merkely.
* * *
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, a dark-blue Crown Victoria with a spotlight mounted on the driver’s side door made the sharp turn onto Redemption Mountain Road. A half mile from the DeWitt farm, the big car pulled off the road into the well-hidden driveway of a cabin that had long ago been destroyed by fire. The driver turned off the ignition and looked at his watch.
“We wait,” he said quietly to his passenger.
“Tell me again why we gotta do this tonight, with a full moon?” the passenger asked.
“Gotta be able to see what we’re looking for. And I want to do this quick. We find what we’re looking for, then get out with nobody knowin’ we were here.”
At one-thirty, the men left the car and walked up Redemption Mountain Road toward the DeWitt farm. They were dressed entirely in black and had smeared their faces and hands with black camouflage cream. The driver wore a black lightweight nylon jacket, zipped to cover his shoulder holster and .45 automatic. Both men carried small bamboo rakes.
They split up as they entered the cornfield. The passenger went quickly to the end of the field and searched in a back-and-forth pattern as he made his way back toward the driver, who did the same from the other end of the field. They would meet somewhere around the middle. Each moved methodically between the towering cornstalks, dragging the small rakes behind them to obliterate their tracks. If they found nothing, evidence of their tracks wouldn’t matter. If their search was successful, it would be imperative that they left no trace.
Near the center of the field, the driver heard a soft pssst a few yards away. He reached inside his jacket for the .45 and pushed through the corn. His partner was squatting amid a distinctly different-looking section of the field, which was covered with dozens of shorter, weedier-looking plants. He looked up with a wide grin shining through his black-smeared face, as he broke off a branch of a marijuana plant to take with them. “Bingo,” he whispered.
CHAPTER 8
The door to Lucien Mackey’s corner office was open, but Charlie Burden knocked as he walked in. The senior partner was hunched over a large conference table that dominated one end of the massive office. “We fucked this up pretty good, Charlie,” he said, peering at a set of blueprints. He frowned. This was going to be a bad day for someone at Dietrich Delahunt & Mackey.
Moving closer to the table, Charlie recognized the layout of the OntAmex plant in West Virginia. “What’s the problem down there?”
“The goddamn pond is in the wrong spot. Can you believe that? After all this time? We’ve been building this thing for over two years, with Paxton and a battalion of contractors, surveyors, and engineers crawling all over it, and nobody notices that the cooling pond is situated on a hundred feet of solid bedrock that a fucking nuclear bomb couldn’t blast through!” Lucien took a deep breath to control his anger. He tossed down his pencil and offered Charlie his hand. “Good morning, Charlie. Thanks for coming in early.”
Mackey gestured toward the black leather couch. “Sit down. We need to talk, and we don’t have a lot of time.” Charlie sank uncomfortably into the center of the couch, as Mackey took one of the chairs. “Terry Summers will be along in a few minutes, and we need to come to an agreement before he gets here.”
Charlie had known his boss long enough to know when he was having trouble getting to the point. “Lucien, what do you want me to do? We always agree on what you want.”
Lucien smiled. “Charlie, about this China thing … You’re a valuable asset here. You’ve brought in a lot of business with OntAmex, a hell of a lot of business, and we want to accommodate you. Hopefully we’ll be able to.” Lucien took a sip of green tea. “But right now we’ve got a problem in West Virginia. And with OntAmex. This pond thing is a very expensive problem for them, even though they okayed all the plans. Torkelson’s on the warpath. So what we need to—”
Suddenly it all came to Charlie as if a brilliant spotlight had been snapped on. Wow, how dense can you be? Lucien’s call. Paxton’s death. Torkelson and Tuthill in town. Terry Summers. Even Brand going after his Giants tickets. Lucien wanted him to go to West Virginia, not China! He wasn’t going to be working on one of the engineering marvels of the millennium. They wanted him to babysit a half-built coal burner in the backwoods of Appalachia.
“You want me to take over the West Virginia project, is that it, Lucien?” Charlie interrupted.
“That’s it, Charlie. OntAmex wants a senior-level person down there to straighten this mess out.” Without looking at Charlie, Lucien continued. “And Torkelson wants that person to be you. It was just a coincidence that you happened to mention getting out into the field, so it’s good timing. This would be good for you, Charlie.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Lucien, come on. It’s West Virginia. The plant’s half built. I need to create something new.”
“A year, Charlie, maybe less.” There was a pleading quality in Lucien’s voice. “You go down there, help Tuthill with the local politics, fix the pond problem, and get the turbines in place. They’re scheduled to arrive in the spring. Then we’ll let Summers mop up and we’ll see about China.”
“Just fix the pond problem and get the turbines in,” Charlie said, thinking out loud.
Lucien hesitated. “There’s one other issue that Torkelson will brief you on, something they’re really concerned about, because they think it could have some impact on this takeover of Continental.”
Charlie’s radar lit up at the mention of Continental. Mergers that went bad were expensive, litigious, career-ending occurrences. Once you made the annou
ncement, billions of dollars were at stake—the kind of money that made individuals, companies, politicians, and regulators do curious things. If whatever was happening in West Virginia could have an impact on the takeover of CES, it was a lot more serious than a site plan with a cooling pond in the wrong place.
“Okay, Lucien, let me have it. I want the straight dope before I listen to Torkelson’s version.”
Lucien got up and closed the door. “Fair enough, Charlie. Here’s where we stand. Torkelson’s ass is hanging out a mile here; Tuthill’s, too. They’ve been in charge of the West Virginia project from the beginning. They’ve done nothing illegal, mind you, but they got a little too inside on this deal, did a little too much conniving, simply because it’s their nature, I think. They can’t just do things straight up, like McCord and Red Landon used to. Anyway, almost three years ago, Torkelson made a deal with Ackerly Coal, which is owned by CES, to supply all the coal for the new plant. At the same time, they’re negotiating with the governor’s economic-development people about the taxes and acquiring land adjacent to the property and all that business, holding out that billion-dollar carrot your friend Duncan loves to beat small towns over the head with.” Lucien paused for another sip of tea.
“Then, someone in the governor’s office came up with a condition that all the fuel for the plant should come from mines in McDowell County, a real depressed area. But the Ackerly guys tell Torkelson that isn’t a problem at all. In fact, it presents a good opportunity to lower OntAmex’s fuel costs for quite some time. Seems that Ackerly owns the rights to a huge seam of good coal down there, enough to supply the plant for fifteen years. And it’s only about ten, twelve miles or so from the plant. An easy trucking operation. Eliminates the need and the expense of putting in a new railroad spur.”
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